Architects Are Here by Michael Winter Page A

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    The sun came up just outside of Whitbourne and the world was now coming into colour. David had been forcing the car, pushing it past the range of its headlights. Then a set of legs crossed the highway. The headlights rammed into the legs, a flare of moose, and a body rolled heavily onto the hood and smashed in the windshield and bent the door posts and landed in our laps. It was like someone had thrown a bunch of heavy luggage on us. We had seatbelts on. The impact knocked the light out of me, I couldnt breathe, and I woke up with a policeman shining a flashlight in my face through the passenger window. It was about six in the morning. The back of the moose was across my chest. The policeman was Randy Jacobs. Boys, he said. Boys youre some lucky. David’s hands pinned to the steering wheel. He could not get them out from under the moose. It took a winch and a jaws of life to open up the door posts. David’s hands all cut up from the windshield glass. That was the end of Zac’s car. We got home on the bus.
    It was eight oclock at night and my father was standing at the stove, pouring dried milk into his second cup of tea. How’d you get home. And I told him about the accident and the bus. My father looking for David. He was shaken and he stared at me and saw the small cuts in my jacket from the nubs of windshield glass. Then he leaned towards me and hugged me. He said, Son, that boy is trouble.
    The dog remembered me, and I stayed in the room that I’d grown up in, in the bunk bed below my brother’s. The texture of the masonite panelling and the slats of wood under the mattress above me. There is a prison which is the view from a bed, and this view slung me back into the confines of childhood, and I could handle that for about three days.

SEVEN
    I N THOSE DAYS of Christmas I walked around my hometown, amazed that I had grown up here. I was all of eighteen. David borrowed his father’s car and we picked up Gwen Hurley and Maggie Pettipaw and walked through the Millbrook Mall. That’s where I saw Nell working at the photography shop, and she took my picture. She was getting off shift, and I saw her borrow a snowsuit from a waitress. She must have been pregnant then, though I didnt know it. Nell was taking a ride at night across the bay ice on the back of a snowmobile driven by Joe Hurley, I heard Maggie Pettipaw say this. So Joe was back in town and had called her. The snowmobile was a big purple Arctic Cat with a reverse gear and a heater in the windjammer and a stereo by Joe Hurley’s left knee. Even if this is what I am, must I defend it. Even if, does it mean I must dislike it. These are Nell’s thoughts. Even if I think it’s for the best, perhaps it’s not. For instance, Ayn Rand. Perhaps I’m not gutsy enough to know what’s best.
    Joe Hurley was from St Judes. The Hurleys had built an extension onto their house. And now they were knocking down the house and building an extension onto the extension. Nell was having dinner with Joe in the house wrapped in vapour barrier. His brother, Gerard—who I went to school with—and the father, the one she’d met in the woods, Loyola.
    Back at residence Lori Durdle said to her youre not going home, and couldnt understand it. Youre not staying here by yourself, she said, over the holidays. And she invited Nell to her home in Stephenville. It was flat, an air base, and Lori’s father had worked as ground crew for aircraft before he lost his hands in a sheet-metal machine. Mr Durdle played the accordion with his stumps and Nell was given a soft drink with a bottle of rum waved over it and on Christmas morning there was a pair of knit socks and trigger mitts and a toque and they were for her cross-country skiing, Mr Durdle said. They were made with Phentex wool which is not wool at all. A man with no hands had given her mittens. Lori’s mother wore a long white cardigan and she made apple pie and those chocolate cookies with mini marshmallows, cookies you kept in